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MILAN KUNDERA: A MAN WHO CANNOT FORGET

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IT was during the Stalinist era of the late 40's, when he was a student in Czechoslovakia, that Milan Kundera says he first learned the value of humor. He learned he could recognize a person who was not a Stalinist by his laughter - the ability to laugh was a sign that someone could be trusted, for it signified irreverence, a refusal to take history and its policemen seriously. Ever since then, he says, he has been ''terrified by a world that is losing its sense of humor.''

Mr. Kundera, who has been living as an emigre in France for the last six years, has learned that humor can have sobering consequences as well. Since the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, his books - which refuse to dignify either the authorities or their solemnity - have been removed from Czechoslovak libraries and his plays banned from theaters. When his most recent novel, ''The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,'' was published in France in 1979, the Czechoslovak Government tried to erase the last vestiges of his nationality: it revoked his citizenship.

If he is persona non grata in his native country, however, Mr. Kundera, at the age of 52, has won international recognition. His books have been translated into some 20 languages, he has won such awards as the Prix Medicis in France, and he recently came to New York to accept the $11,000 Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature.

More Erotic Than Political

By turns amusing and grave, introspective and exuberant, Mr. Kundera speaks in Czech and French with a few sentences of recently learned English thrown in for good measure; his wife, Vera, serves as his English translator. As Mr. Kundera is quick to point out, he does not see himself as a dissident writer, and his books, for all the controversy they have elicited, tend to focus more directly on erotic and psychological matters than on matters of political import. They are regarded as ''subversive,'' he says, only insofar as they raise questions of moral and social ambiguity - something that is not encouraged by the Czechoslovak authorities.

In another sense, of course, nearly all of Mr. Kundera's work is animated by a concern with politics - that is, politics as manifested in the ironic, even absurd, conditions of life in a totalitarian regime. In ''The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,'' a man named Clementis lends his hat to a party leader, as they stand posing for a picture; years later, having fallen out of official favor, Clementis is airbrushed out of the photograph; al l that remains of him is his hat, sitting on another's head. And in a shor t story in ''Laughable Loves,'' a young man feigns religious fervor in order to seduce a pious girl, only to find himself in trouble w ith the state's atheistic leaders. Mixing History With Fantasy

Playfully mixing history with philosophy and fantasy, Mr. Kundera creates a world in which routine expectations are undercut, ideals and reason mocked. It is a world similar in many respects to Kafka's - a world, as Mr. Kundera notes, seen from the point of view of a small country that has been a victim of history.

''Small countries like Czechoslovakia could never adore the cult of history,'' Mr. Kundera explains. ''One cannot imagine Hegel, for instance, coming from Prague. On the other hand, in Russia both the authorities and the dissidents regard history as something comprehensible, and they take it very seriously. They are convinced they are part of a grand, positive evolution; or they are convinced they live in a great tragedy - either way, they are convinced they are to live in greatness. The point of view of Central Europe is quite opposite. For us, there is no historical mission; rather, one sees the grotesque side of history. Our obsession isn't with a grand future, but with the possibility of our end and the end of Europe.''

In terms of culture, Mr. Kundera points out, Czechoslovakia has never been part of Russian-dominated Eastern Europe, but belongs instead to Central Europe, with its legacy of Freud's psychoanalysis, Schonberg's dodecaphony and the novels of Kafka and Hasek. The occupation of Czechoslovakia, he believes, is as much a cultural tragedy as it is a political one: By proscribing Czechoslovak writers and inhibiting artistic expression, the Soviet Union is trying to implement what he calls ''organized forgetting'' - they are intent on eras ing Cz echoslovak traditions and replacing them with their own. 'Maximum Nonconformity'

Clearly Mr. Kundera's own work represents an attempt to preserve his own past and his memories of a country he will probably never return to. The son of a well-known pianist, Mr. Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and in the wake of World War II he enlisted in the Communist Party, which represented for him, as it did for so many of the bright young people of the day, ''the expression of maximum nonconformity.'' ''All the Czech avant-garde were Communists,'' he has said, ''all the people I admired, the painters and writers. There was a certain beauty and poetry to the revolution.''

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He was quickly disabused of these ideals, however. Expelled from the party in 1948, he spent several years working as a laborer and jazz musician, and eventually ended up teaching at the Prague Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies. Although it seemed, for a while, that a new era of ''socialism with a human face'' might be possible in Czechoslovakia - ''The Joke,'' Mr. Kundera's satirical novel about life under Stalinism, was published during a period of increased freedom in 1967 - these hopes quickly expired with events of the following year.

Although his novels have resulted in the revoking of his Czechoslovak citizenship, they have made him something of an intellectual celebrity in the West, where he has even been featured in Vogue magazine. It is an irony that is not lost on Mr. Kundera. In the West, he notes, where artists can become rich and famous, art is often taken for granted as entertainment; in the East, where art remains ''the one domain where you can express yourself with relative liberty,'' it carries ''a social importance that is much greater.''

''There is another thing I've become persuaded of as well,'' he continues. ''I am convinced that a great novel is always linked with historical events that throw man into situations which de-mask him. And I think that today on our planet there are two such places - Central Europe and Latin America. I find a lot of significance in the fact that these are also two regions where the novel is extremely alive. Unexpected and new political situations enable us to pose all sorts of metaphysical and anthropological questions.'' 'Very Sad to Leave'

In his own case, Mr. Kundera says, Czechoslovakia's recent history has compelled him to re-examine his relationship with his former country and its relationship with the rest of Europe. ''It was naturally very sad to leave,'' he says. ''Whenever you leave something and know you cannot go back, it is sad, and when the town you leave is as beautiful as Prague is, it is especially sad. On the other hand, the Prague which was once a cosmopolitan city no longer exists. Europe no longer exists in Prague, and I, who live in Paris, am perhaps less of an emigre from the real Prague than the people who remain behind.''

After several years in Rennes and several years in Paris, Mr. Kundera now considers France his home. He has made a new life for himself in the Paris intellectual community, and says he has no plans to return to Czechoslovakia - ''even if one day it becomes absolutely free.'' France, after all, has given him a sp ecial vantage point from which to view his former home: its tradi tion of classicism provides a fitting counterpoint to the Baroqu e traditions of Prague; and its language, he says, has enriched his n ative tongue. Prague, 'an Imaginary Country'

And yet Mr. Kundera remains a man who cannot forget. Although he writes essays and letters in French, he continues to write all his fiction in Czech and to set all his stories in the city where he grew up. ''I always write of Prague, but Prague has become for me a kind of imaginary country,'' he says. ''To write a novel, you must be true to your obsessions, your ideas and your imagination, and these are things with roots in your childhood. It is the images from your childhood and youth which form the imaginary country of your novels, and this imaginary country, in my case, is named Prague.''

Since finishing ''The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,'' Mr. Kundera has started another novel - tentatively concerned with Goethe and focused on ''the confrontation of Prague and the world.'' The book, he says half in jest, will be his last.

''I believe you must write each book as though it were the last,'' he says. ''You must never put anything aside for the next book. I have always had the impression that the book I am working on will be my epilogue, that I will write no more. But I cannot stop -I am condemned to go on.''

A version of this review appears in print on January 18, 1982, on Page C00013 of the National edition with the headline: MILAN KUNDERA: A MAN WHO CANNOT FORGET. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe